City & Society最新文献

In Latin America’s pink tide democracies, peripheries were pivotal openings into the ambiguities of political and economic urban governance. Once portrayed as territories of decay, state disregard, and societal oblivion, peripheries turned into key moral and spatial assemblages in Brazil’s post-neoliberal project of a “de-poored,” middle-class country. This article draws on ethnographic research conducted in two peripheral Minha Casa Minha Vida projects—Brazil’s large-scale public housing program—in the city of Porto Alegre. Charting the long-term entanglements of local activism, communal hope, and national developmentalism, I argue that peripheral zones illuminate the ambivalences of state- and place-making. Unveiling the politics of differentiation and distended governance that render one periphery a successful case of state and market intervention over the other, I explore how images of the “model periphery” are enforced through local infrastructures of worth and the effacement of its failed Other: the intractable faraway periphery, deemed to disappear in the name of public accountability and social and economic development. In conclusion, the article suggests that the consorted travails of leaders, citizen activists, politicians, and planners in casting visibility onto the model periphery contribute to bolstering and obscuring extant patterns of urban segregation and social inequality.

Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Mediterranean port city of Oran, this article examines why Algerians, after nearly sixty years of independence, continue to use French colonial-era placenames instead of the post-colonial names commemorating the martyrs of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). I argue that vernacular place-naming, including the use of colonial-era names, should be understood as a component of what I call the “poetics of grievance,” whereby city dwellers simultaneously draw attention to linguistic and physical urban forms to express dissatisfaction with their post-colonial authoritarian state. By examining local taxi drivers’ detailed knowledge of vernacular placenames and the everyday talk that often accompanies them, this article demonstrates how the colonial past can become a powerful poetic resource for city dwellers, serving as a means to conceptualize the potential for grief and rage to bring about revolutionary change in post-colonial cities.

As neoliberalism has torn apart the policies of social and collective stability integral to the visions of welfare states post-World War II, precarity has become central to the study of advanced capitalist societies. This contribution invokes literary explorations of urbanity to argue that the anthropological analysis of the “urban” is pivotal to the understanding of how contemporary precarity is made and experienced. It draws on my fieldwork with the French Gilets Jaunes movement. The study of the urban has a long history both outside Europe and the United States as well as within. By contrast, precarity has emerged as a key word in the historic centers of capital where states have abandoned aspirations for expanding wellbeing. The papers presented here explore the relevance of this concept to post-colonial countries where life, as many have pointed out, has always been precarious.

Cities have long been associated with precarity. This link seems to have intensified under contemporary global regimes of capitalism, with both popular and academic discourses noting the risks that come with building and inhabiting urban environments. The introduction to this special issue reflects on the various ways in which anthropology has engaged with the relationship between “urbanity” and “precarity.” It argues that current work on precarity either favors the experiences of the Global North or sidelines the urban dimension. Studies that overcome these obstacles, moreover, are largely crystalizing around discussions of infrastructure and securitization. We offer the notion of “urban precarity” as a call for ethnography that cross-germinates developments in urban studies with those made in our understanding of precarity. By foregrounding the urban, the ethnography collated here suggests that in the cities of late capitalism, precarity emerges as a multifaceted condition, encapsulating not only legal and economic deprivation but also moral, spiritual, political, and health-related uncertainties. As the protagonists of our ethnography struggle to deal with the many threats bearing down upon them, precarity is also revealed as a condition conducive to world-building and social transformation, although such forms of creative agency are highly experimental and liable to backfire.

In the United States, undocumented Latinx immigrants’ precarious social positions are rooted in aggressive immigration enforcement practices that create a contestant threat of detection and deportation. This threat extends into the US interior, and in some US cities, immigrant policing practices rely on law enforcement officers racially profiling Latinx immigrants. Several social scientists have described the numerous consequences of racially-based immigrant policing, but insufficient scholarship examines the role urban and suburban spaces play in constructing the policing regimes that structure undocumented immigrants’ precarity. In this article, I examine the relationship between immigration enforcement regimes, automobiles, and the suburban roadways in a previously rural Central Florida exurb. Using frameworks of automobility, illegality, and necropolitics, I show how Central Florida’s expanding suburban infrastructure contributes to immigrant policing efforts. I further show how spectacles of immigration enforcement, such as parking border patrol vehicles along specific highways, are performances of state power to reinforce racial hierarchies. Overall, I argue that spatial and material conditions—such as driving vehicles that law enforcement officers associate with undocumented immigrants on specific roadways—serve to simultaneously underscore undocumented immigrants’ vulnerability and to signal to white residents how law enforcement officers maintain white supremacy by targeting undocumented Latinx drivers.